BOOKS 79 The Serious Mr. Priestley and tite Frivolous Mr. Coward 1\ S PECTREPROOF as / \ the too, too solid ; I ) Mr. Priestley may ",-,' seem, he will be oJ. haunted to the end by two ghosts rising up from his unlucky past. One of these ghosts is the reputa- tion for mere amiability conferred upon him by "The Good Companions." The other is the reputation for mere un- amiability created for him by American ship-news reporters. In "Midnight on the Desert," subtitled "Being An Ex- cursion into Autobiography During a Winter in America, 1935-36," he is out, among other things, to lay both of these ghosts, and makes a neat job of it, too. In fact, this should stand as one of his best books, though it is not up to either "Angel Pavement" or "English Journey ." . "Midnight on the Desert" consists of a loosely connected series of mono- logues. Mr. Priestley demonstrates that he is reflective and serious, as well as hearty and humorous, by producing what is in effect a group of well-written informal essays on such subjects ( tu mention, for the moment, those not specifically about America) as the glam- our of the Theatre, the problems of the contemporary novelist, D. H. Law- rence, the classless state, his own pri- vate "Liberal Socialist" Utopia (which sounds rather sensible), the romantic conception of childhood, why life plus art is better and no less virile than life minus art, the magical function of great music, the drawbacks of the academic life, the imbecilities of the half-baked "scientific" viewpoint, the quarrel be- tween the State and the Individual, and the bewildering problem of Time. This last leads Mr. Priestley into those fas- cinating pol ydimensional worlds opened up by Ouspensky and J. W. Dunne's extraordinary buok, far too little known here, "An Experiment with Time." Most of the commentary is very shrewd stuff indeed, even the semi-mystical ponderings on Time. If, after reading him, you still believe Mr. Priestley to be no more than a bluff Y orkshireman with a lively eye for Dickensian char- acters, then he has a perfect right, edit- ing Sir John Suckling slightly, to cry: Will nothing shake you? The devil take you! As for Ghost No.2, about half of the book consists of opinions on Amer- ica, its life, and its land. These opin- t jj! n1 "' 1 f l "mid r . ' 1:<.' .. '., ":i%f:.. ,.,.... .. ','4,'<.'% ..., ;t",,:'4.. <. 7 J I ' i ';tr' '" , 1 }1 é" . .,,: " "5::" {,;? < : '\,' 1 L "'" f -d< " , " .- ! ,L0 }, li . .,_/' S, ' L .\\ \ , 11f1 If '1 , ' '.(f;:t r : ... f,/.1 f \ \' ions, though often highly critical, seem quite devoid of malice, and in most cases worthy of the closest attention. Mr. Priestley dislikes many things, but they are the things that, in general, it seems reasonable to dislike, such as the entertainment in the Rainbow Room, the film version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," college cheerleaders, the drear aspect of prairie towns, the overdressed women one meets in cross- country dining cars, and the Mojave desert. He likes the right things, too: autumn in the .Berkshires, American workingmen, the winter air of Arizo- na, cowboys (a little sentimental here, Mr. P.), Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Boulder Dam, students who work their way through college, and particularly the Grand Canyon, to which he devotes his finest pages. He writes not only as if no one had ever 'X-._ :::::::- t: :: . t?- Ii::, . V\ I \;,.. i :;::, ;: 'w '" .... --.:. written about the Grand Canyon be- fore, but as if no one had ever seen it before. The tone of the book is consistently agreeable, except when Mr. Priestley is indulging in that humorous and not too genuine self-deprecation which seems an occupational disease among British writ- ers. How the same man could have created this sensible, acute book and also the feeble "They Walk in the City" and the feebler "Wonder Hero" is just one of those insoluble literary mysteries. N OEL COWARD'S autobiography, "Present Indicative," is about what you would expect. It is a readable demonstration of Mr . Coward's literal belief in the one about all the world's being a stage. Mr. Priestley is willing and able to discuss most things under the sun; Mr. Coward is unwilling and i . . .......;. " i i t 1,. ' - . "., r 3t " . :%" >\ l I' 1 < · ) u t,.i'."""<<".: '\ :á l.&;:.:,.w - ((He gave me the cutest roadster-and I want to give him something too."